I am touched and inspired by the outpouring of emotion following the tragic death of Aaron Swartz. His life and activities have affected many. I am most familiar with Aaron Swartz through two of his works of activism: the PACER document release, an action that I strongly support, and his download of JSTOR files, an action that I sympathize with.

Aaron Swartz at SILS

I am touched and inspired by the number of tributes I have seen friends post on Facebook and Twitter. At SILS, we well remember Aaron’s visit to the student association, SILSSA, back in the 2006/7 academic year. I had no idea how many people looked up to him.

I am touched and inspired by the way Aaron’s death reached beyond the circles of free information enthusiasts. The New York Times online reported on his death in detail on the front page (or front screen, as the case may be). The On the Media coverage was equally dignified.

I am touched and inspired after listening for two and a half hours to the live streaming of the memorial to Aaron Swartz organized by Democracy Now!. I am not quite sure how many speakers there were, but my guess is between 10-15. Each and every one of the tributes is worth listening to; don’t skip a single one. Aaron’s scope of activity, and the personality he had to match, require this many people to tell his story.

I am touched and inspired by the words of Roy Singham (and I apologize, but as of this writing there are no minute breakdowns in the recording of the memorial, and you’ll have to watch it all to find any one speaker), whose j’accuse words generated positive action from anger toward the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.

I am touched and inspired by all the tributes paid in the memorial and am in awe of Aaron Swartz and his commitment to First Amendment Rights. I urge you to watch the entire (2.5 hour) recording. Due to the inability to pause-and-play right now, I am refraining from writing a more detailed review.

I am touched and inspired by the words of Quinn Norton and Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the only women among the speakers. Both are personal friends, the first a former partner and the second his current partner and an activist in her own right. The words were personal and moving and they both, particularly Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, addressed his civic activities as well.
And while I would not have omitted any of the speakers, I can’t help but wonder at the lack of women among them. Are there no women active among access rights, or did Aaron Swartz not work with them? Some who come to mind are Patrice McDermott from Open the Government, danah boyd, who paid a very nice tribute to Aaron on her blog , Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Foundations , and Kathleen Fitzpatrick of MLA. This absence of women saddens me and I am not aware of any women, Aaron’s age or younger, who are taking on these activities—though correct me if I am wrong, and send me names.

I am touched and inspired by the work of Aaron Swartz and he will continue to inspire and inform my own work for many years to come.
I will end with a quote from an essay titled When is Transparency Useful? that Aaron Swartz wrote and that was made freely available to the public by the publisher, O’Reilly, in tribute to him.

I suspect few people would put “publishing government documents on the Web” high on their list of political priorities, but it’s a fairly cheap project (just throw piles of stuff into scanners) and doesn’t seem to have much downside. The biggest concern—privacy —seems mostly taken care of. In the United States, FOIA and the Privacy Act (PA) provide fairly clear guidelines for how to ensure disclosure while protecting people’s privacy.

I hate it when within a span of a week I get eight pick up notices from NYPL for books that I reserved online. But alas, this is what happened this week, when eight books arrived all at once. Since there is no way in a million that I can read them in three weeks, I spent the last couple of days going over them one-by-one, reading a chapter or two before deciding which I will keep and which I will return unread.
Here are my first impressions of the following books:

Zadie Smith, NW. This is going to the return pile. Despite a promising beginning, Leah, the heroine, who is dwelling on how boring she is, convinced me enough so that I don’t really care to read on. The language feels like it was written for the camera, you could feel it moving between the characters at an angle and their lines. I do admit there are some gems here, even in the first few sentences that I read:
For example, when pondering on the chain of event that improbably brought her and her husband together, she reflects:It is hard to explain – in that game of musical chairs – why they should have
stopped, finally, at each other.
Or this exchange between Leah and Michel, they end:
- What do you want me to say? The world is what it is.
– Then why’re we even trying?

Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton. I admit, I was never a big Salman Rushdie fan. To me, he is the author of one important book, Midnight’s Children, and I never cared for anything else he wrote. But after hearing an interview with Salman Rushdie on his recent memoir, I decided to give it a try. Bottom line: another one for the return pile. The book is just too long; the 600+ pages should be cut by half. There are some really good sections but they are separated by long sections with side stories on too many characters and it feels like a lot of name dropping is going on. The editor should have been more insistent here.

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Maybe my attention span is shortening, but at 736 pages, this too is a bit too detailed for me. We all know that politics is petty but it’s enough to give just a couple of examples and not a play-by-play of the entire eight weeks. The book feels a little like a Twitter reenactment of the first eight weeks of LBJ’s presidency.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Two-part Interventions. This novel is “grabbed from the headlines” and based on the story of the pianist Joyce Hatto and her husband and producer William Barrington-Coupe, who was discovered to have faked his wife recording. The story was covered in the New Yorker soon after the fraud was discovered.
The book is readable but not satisfying. Schwartz goes to great efforts to demonstrate Philip’s devotion to his Suzanne but the relationship is flat and has undertones of a romance novel. The parts about the fraud and the chain of reasoning that leads someone to commit such fraud while being well aware of the risks, are the better parts of the book. Alas, when once can choose only 1 or 2 from eight, difficult choices have to me made.

Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography. This is a book I will probably end up buying. It contains short biographical essays for about forty people, mostly literary figures. I read the one about Bernard Malamud and enjoyed it very much. When a name comes up, I would prefer to turn to this book than to a Wikipedia entry.

And now for the keepers: I put three aside although clearly I will not get to all of them before the due date, so they will probably need to be returned and borrowed again.

Pow! and Big Breasts & Wide Hips by the 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan. Both books come with a warning to readers about writing that is violent and bloody, but the first few pages a Pow! Are quite captivating so I will give them a try.

The spring semester begins next week and my reading for leisure is expected to slow down. I wish there was a better way to manage requests from NYPL so that I don’t end up with eight books in one week. Netflix seems to manage that with the 1-at-a-time or 2-at-a-time system, so how about it NYPL?

About

Both my research and teaching address the communication of knowledge within the areas of information policy, government information and scholarly communication. Theoretically, I draw from the framework described by Siva Vaidhyanathan as Critical Information Studies (2006).